Rails How to Login a Guest User with Devise

Question

So I have this app that I'm making where users have profiles after they signup and input their information.

At the moment I'm trying to add a feature that allows for new unregistered users to go to a profile to see what the app is like before they need to sign up (I'm planning on putting a "try it for free" button on the home_controller#index action. For authentication, I'm using the Devise gem.

Currently, I've watched the Railscast (393) on this, but I can't figure out (after several hours of trying) how to implement guest users and log them in using Devise.

I've also read about 4 different solutions on SO, and have decided to stick to this one (how to create a guest user in Rails 3 + Devise):

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    def current_user
      super || guest_user
    end

    private

    def guest_user
     User.find(session[:guest_user_id].nil? ? session[:guest_user_id] = create_guest_user.id : session[:guest_user_id])
    end

    def create_guest_user
      u = User.create(:name => "guest", :email => "guest_#{Time.now.to_i}#{rand(99)}@example.com")
      u.save(:validate => false)
      u
    end

...
end

I have this in my application_controller.rb and don't understand how I would use these functions in the home_controller#index to create a guest user and log into the profile when the "Try it" button is clicked.

I've tried manually creating a user, saving it without authentication and then using Devise's sign_in method on link like so: <a href="<%= sign_in(:user, some_guest_user) %>">Try it!</a> and also tried <a href="<%= profile_path %>">Try it!</a>

I tried this, but the profile throws some validation messages saying I need to log in to view it. I've also tried removing before_filter authenticate! on the profiles_controller but I can't seem to get this to work at all.

Would anyone know how to create a user on the button click, and auto sign them into a guest profile? Thanks a lot for any help, I'm completely lost here.

Answer 1

I think you have a misunderstanding on what a guest user is. You say that you want guest users to auto sign in, and that is wrong. Guest users can't sign in, because... Well, because they are guests. You want to create them, but not sign them in.

This is why you want these helper methods in your ApplicationController, because when you try to get the current_user, if that doesn't exist (nil), you will have a fallback (that is why you use the || operator), that will assign a guest_user as a current_user.

So, forget about using sign_in links for guest users and you should be fine.